Soak Stain

on the myth of Étaín, Helen Frankenthaler and liquid surrender

all I want

is to fall apart

in the arms of someone

entirely strange to me

these lyrics from Cassandra Jenkins’ Crosshairs¹ often stay with me,

as i drift through a day they will loop on repeat, lightly singsongy and full to the brim with the desire for a surrender that feels so straigtforward and simple like the lines of the song, and yet deep, unleashing and potentially catastrophic

the desire for someone or something that will hold firm, hold you in your moments of undoing

this is a liquid kind of wish

in it I imagine a wisp of a moment, the briefest of transformations in the sprawling myth of Étaín², a woman made suddenly into a puddle of water, dissolved and disintegrated on a flagstone floor

what happens to her here? in this momentous instant? just before she is transformed again into a butterfly or a beetle or a fly? the story glosses past too quickly to satisfy the immense curiosity and bodily fear I feel faced with the idea of it,

complete liquid collapse,

i see parts of self seeping through the ground, lost forever in the cracks, parts lifted into the air by warming condensation currents, drifting away as a cloud, fast footsteps walking through the very centre of your being, leaving glinting light catching trails of you in prints along the path

this is a core shaking kind of vulnerability and its image has haunted me from the very moment I met it

what comes to mind when I think of this flowing liquid surrender is the prose of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva,

a kind of merge submerge, slip and surrender

one instant dissolving into the next, one and one and one, particles that make molecules that travel the distance of a river

so fleeting that it’s already gone because it’s already become a new instant- now that’s also already gone. Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.

My state is that of a garden with running water. In describing it I try to mix words that time can make itself. What I tell you should be read quickly like when you look.

I’m afraid of the accursed Sunday that liquidifies me.

or The Waves by Virginia Woolf,

wherein the characters are continuously dissolving and becoming remade in eachother’s embraces

sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

the fluidity that runs through these texts, held too in their titles, emerging as some inherent quality of the genre

stream of consciousness

words that move like water

on christmas day i charged too quickly towards the sea, not noticing the true height and power of the waves until, standing only knee deep, they crashed over me and took the floor from below my feet, a fast and gasping furious tumble, again and again and again and a shocking reminder of how quickly one can be swallowed,

the furious tossing required willing submission, gasps of air and a body offering loosing deference to the turning until,

with a generous stranger’s helping arm,

my feet again found footing

i wonder did these writers also find the paper to be a pair of willing arms, ready to hold the words they loosed liquid across its surface, catching hold of them before they were entirely washed away?

The Waterfall Fairy, 1921 ~ Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

there are women’s water bodies spread out across the island

Boann, Sionnan, Ierne³

almost daily I have crossed anna livia’s⁴ slow murky stretch, mouth open to the bay,

she drinks in tides and slides her body, wind rippled, and snakelike skin filled with the city

the part of her I know best is a constant conversation, the bay, the city, the people, the ports, the places she has passed through to the place of her cronehood

the letting herself go dissolved to the sea, and full to the brim of all she has swallowed

but these transformations terrify me less then Étaín’s, for all the parts they may shed or gain these river women seem never at risk of losing their selfhood, their change is unfolding, time moved forward, loss and gain like a life lived long

Étaín dissolves, falls apart, no stranger here

she is given no arms to hold her, and so out she pours flooded, directionless, no banks to guide the flow?

i wonder are these arms given? or are they made, carved out in the flowing?

still they are of the earth, they are a substance other to the stream, and so made or found or given, they are a strangers arms

a stranger brought into a particular kind of relationship

to borrow words again from Clarice Lispector,

There is some thing still holding me. Or am I holding it? It’s also this: I’m not entirely unbound because I am in union with everything.

i wonder what is found in these strangers arms? arms who catch and gather and hold,

and Cassandra Jenkins answers;

in your eyes I

see the panoply

of the people

inside me

the arms and eyes of the other person, alike in what they offer,

an other like the capital O other described in object relations,

(mother/other)

arms and eyes, one in whose gaze we come to know ourselves

Winnicott⁵ calls this holding, the physical space in the arms of the mother, the emotional space of having ourselves held in mind, our needs met, gathered up by one who anticipates needs so smoothly that for a time in early infanthood it seems as though it is us alone who creates the world around us

Bion⁶ calls it containment, out we spill all of our unknowable insides and carefully they are gathered by the mother/other who makes sense of them for us and offers them back, manageable, digestible, swallowable

in this role as the one who takes in changes and offers back, the mother becomes the transformational object

Bollas⁷ says that as adults we are eternally searching for further transformational objects “in order to surrender to it as a medium that alters the self”

it is in relation to the world that we come to have a form

held by eyes, by arms,

by hopes, memory, loves and losses

and help too by paper, or by canvas? which offer themselves up to hold all that is unleashed across them?

saying, spill and pour and soak me, still I can take all of your unwieldy staining splutter and hold my own

did Helen Frankenthaler feel such a response from her floor stretched canvases as she set the paint loose over them?

Blue Territory, 1955 ~ Helen Frankenthaler

soak

stain

it is easy to forget the many revolutions made by women whose work we become so familiar with that can nearly no longer see it

was one of hers the bold allowing of such large and visible release?

the setting of self loose like Étaín, but this surrender chosen?

spread vivid and staining and held up for all to see?

Helen Frankenthaler in her studio, 1956 ~ photograph by Gordon Parks for Life Magazine

there she sits, appearing so serene in her studio, surrounded by a flooding of her own making

but I am drawn more to the energy in images of the pour

helen frankenthaler workin in her studio

at a time when women were still routinely lobotomized or electroshocked or drugged or hidden away for any emotions that raged out of respectable bounds, this kind of spilling seems to me to be

defiant

Vessel, 1961 ~ Helen Frankenthaler

a continuous unleashing of the soak stain, spreading across paper or canvas,

and there is such a draw in the thought of a material which will absorb every drop, there are no parts of self lost here to cracks in the floor, the is paint spilled and now here it lies, held in the eyes of the image,

here, a pause, stand back and see

spread out in colour

the panoply

The Bay, 1963 ~ Helen Frankenthaler

fall apart on a flagstone floor, a puddle splattering, spilling out in all directions, splitting off, no way of finding one’s way back together

or

falling apart

and arms that will gather up the pieces, take our parts and help us make sense of them, colours caught, eyes to reflect us back to ourselves, river banks to guide the flow, a sense of being

transformed?

Étaín dissolved into a puddle coloured by the depth of her feelings, the floor beneath her now a canvas into which this moment of her being has soaked

---

1. from the gorgeous album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature - if you would like to listen to it, it’s the first song in the playlist above ^

2. Tochmarc Étaíne (The Wooing Of Étaín) ~ as with all myths there are a few versions of this story, the telling that remains vivid in my mind is from a childrens book. You can read a translation of the medieval irish text from the yellow book of lecan here .

3. the names of women in irish mythology who are transformed into/are swept away and drowned by rivers which now bear their names

Boann - river boyne, Sionnan - river shannon, Ierne - river erne

4. The river liffey - personified as anna livia in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake

5. Winnicott, D. (1960). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. In The maturational process and the facilitating environment (pp. 37–56). New York: Karnac.

Winnicott, D.W. (2017) Playing and reality. London & New York: Routledge

6. Bion, W.R. (2023). Learning from Experience. London & New York: Routledge.

7. Bollas, C. (2018). The Shadow of the Object : Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. Abingdon; New York (N.Y.): Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.